{skimming through Principles of Neural Science}
Hmmm…checks out.
Stranger
Oh, yeah. I know about baked beans.
But I’m meaning just a regular can of, say pinto beans.
Those, certain brand with the secret recipe are so full of sugar you would get more nutritional value from a Reese’s cup candy.
Yikes. I’ve never even checked to see that.
That’s just weird. I hope we haven’t been getting canned beans with extra sugar.
I have 1,639 more bones in my body than you because my brain works mechanically. Old fashioned but reliable.
Just checked my fridge to see what I had missed the last time I went to the supermarket. Chorizo, a Spanish paprika sausage. Dextrose (sorry for the crappy cutting of the package, I didn’t expect to want to take a picture of that, you can still read it I hope):
French salami with fennel. Lactose and dextrose:
Jamón serrano, a cured ham. Only needs pork meat and salt. But has dextrose (and ascorbic acid and natrium nitrate and potassium nitrate):
You see how small they print it? If you don’t take extra care it escapes your attention. But guaranteed traditional speciality is printed big and bold. Three times during my last visit to the supermarket alone I fell for it. I should pay more attention, I am not happy and neither is my wife.
I assume a true artisan process wouldn’t add glucose or lactose. This is… not surprising, because it seems (in my cynical mind) completely typical for mass-produced processed food products… but puzzling, I guess, because what culinary goal does it serve?
It is an unsupported science belief of the capitalist-industrial food complex that adding sugar makes all foods taste better and is addictive, so you will eat more of it and buy it again despite you not even noticing it is there (and them hiding the fact that it is there in the tiniest minute small print in green colour over blue background they can get away with). No, there is no contradiction at all there and their conscience is clean.
Sugar is also very cheap.
Nitrates are fairly common in cured meats (and “natrium”, in English, would be “sodium”). Ascorbic acid might or might not be in the traditional recipe, but it’s not only harmless, it’s good for you: It’s better known as vitamin C.
The dextrose (AKA glucose), though, is completely uncalled for.
Indeed, you are right concerning the sodium (dang! I should have known that!) and the Vit. C. Not such a big deal. But unnecessary nonetheless.
But the glucose/dextrose/sucrose/lactose/fructose/whatever-ose is terrible, that was the point I wanted to make. Why do they feed me added sugar?
I smell a conspiracy. Or is that chorizo cooking?
Not to me, and my wife likes them with milk, whats wrong with milk? You think there is added sugar there?
There is sugar in milk. Lots of it.
Lactose is sugar.
And it’s for baby cows
Just had a look at my stock of Goya beans - no added sugar.
Dan
It’s not added sugar, and it’s for whoever can get it.
I have to hide the credit card so my cat, Spike, doesn’ty light out for the supermarket.
Dan
Of course there is- but its not added sugar.
And humans have been using it for about 10000 years or so.
There is also sugar in- sugar!
The issue is hidden added sugar under funny names.
If you wanna add a tablespoon of sugar to your Cheerios- fine. You do it consciously, and knowingly.
But there’s 7 grams of added sugar in a freaken McDonalds cheeseburger. Ketchup. Pnut butter, canned vegetables, breads, etc.
Gotcha
Shredded Wheat has zero added sugar. I buy that one sometimes. All the ones mentioned above have added sugar, although not as much as, say, Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs.
I don’t typically buy much prepackaged except canned tomatoes and those austere swedish crackers (okay, and kippered herring sometimes). When I eat someone else’s packaged foods, man they taste sweet. I can also taste the chemicals in them, often. If everything you eat has sugar in it, you just don’t taste it any more, I guess.
That’s silly in this case. Dextrose isn’t added to make it sweet; it’s to aid in the fermenting process. You can see that only a trivial amount is added. It’s extremely common in meat curing.
If you don’t see it in some products, it may well still be there, but falls under the labeling threshold for whatever reason.
Yes, I was being silly in the quoted part of that post, but I did not say it was added to make it sweet. I said it was added to make it taste better. And it works. The food industry spends a lot of money for taste adjustment. Want to have a look? It is beautiful!
(A bit too white prevalent for my taste, but still. Nicely done, almost mondrianesque.)
Anyway, as DrDreth has just written in post #151: sugar is OK. But I would like to decide myself when I take it, and how much.
ETA: And, if possible, I would like to choose what kind of sugar I take. Because corn syrup (my personal unsupported science belief, the subject of this thread) is worse than other sugars, and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the worst.
Yeah. That’s one of the ‘unsupported beliefs’ that I think might be true. Indeed, I would go further, and say that there might be an infinite number of alternate worlds, comprising every possible series of events that could realistically happen. I like to think of these worlds as 4 dimensional universes (3 dimensions of space and one of time) existing side by side as ‘foliations’ in a five dimensional universe.
I’ve described this model before, here and elsewhere, but few people seem to think it is a viable model. Which may (or may not) mean it is wrong. However, this is only something that I think of as a possibility, rather than an actual belief. In general I try to avoid actual beliefs, because they limit possibilities too much.
I’d be fine with that statement if you had said “don’t” instead of “can’t”. The word “can’t” seems to imply that we will never fully understand the human brain. This quite a silly belief, though one has to be careful to define what we mean by “understand”.
I concur that no one person will ever have a full understanding of their own brain or anybody else’s, but that not because of some mysticism about a lesser apparatus never being able to model and equivalent or greater one, or some silly extrapolation from Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. It’s because it’s too damn complicated, and it’s the same mundane reason that no single person today can fully understand every single technological aspect of even a modest contemporary computer.
But what we can do is collectively understand these things so that we can productively use them, improve them, and maintain them. My belief is that this collective knowledge, along with improvements in the sciences across the board and improvements in AI, could allow us even today to build a rough emulation of any given human personality. Some decades from now – I have no idea how many – advanced sensing equipment will allow us to upload and effectively activate the entire contents of a human brain on an electronic substrate. The preservation of knowledge and personality in this way would be a turning point in human evolution.